Re: Upcoming X.org release and splitting packages

[Harold L Hunt II <huntharo at msu dot edu>]

David Fraser wrote:

> Harold L Hunt II wrote:
>
> > We will soon (possibly next week) be releasing a new version of all 
> > Cygwin/X packages built from the source code tree managed by X.org and 
> > hosted on freedesktop.org. This will be a very good thing since all of 
> > the Cygwin/X developers will be able to stay in sync with the exact 
> > code that is in distribution via CVS, compared to our current system 
> > today where the code in distribution has many differences from that in 
> > CVS. The rebuild won't mean much to end users: all libraries remain 
> > binary compatible with the current packages and the contents of the 
> > release (programs, etc.) will be almost identical.
> >
> > In case you have not noticed, I created a build and packaging script 
> > system for Cygwin/X last week (took 60+ hours). This script system 
> > does a few things for us, such as allowing us to easily distribute 
> > source tarballs via Cygwin's setup.exe. More importantly, the script 
> > system allows us to exercise a finer control over what files each 
> > package contains and how many packages we break the distribution up 
> > into. We can very easily rename current packages when we make the next 
> > release, we can split existing packages into pieces, or we could take 
> > a set of packages, roll them back together, then split that entire 
> > mess into mixed pieces of the originals.
> >
> > I am mentioning this now because I can think of a few things that I 
> > would like to change in our package layout in time for the X.org 
> > release, but I would also like to get feedback from the community on 
> > what you think would be useful. Please take a look at my brief list of 
> > ideas below and send your thoughts to the mailing list if you have 
> > something about our packaging that you have wanted changed for a long 
> > time.
> >
> > My Proposals for Packaging Changes
> > ==================================
> > 1) Due to popular demand, rename the "prog" package to "devel". The 
> > name "devel" matches the defacto standard used by other packages for 
> > link libraries and header files; most people have no idea what the 
> > "prog" package is for, but they do know what a "devel" package is for.
>
>
> +1
>
> > 2) Split the "bin" package into at least a few pieces (but not too 
> > many pieces):
> >
> > 2a) "bin-dlls" will contain the .dll files only. This would allow 
> > packages like emacs or xemacs to depend only on bin-dlls instead of on 
> > the entire bin package which includes programs not used by emacs nor 
> > xemacs.
> >
> > 2b) "bin-lndir" would contain the lndir utility. lndir has no 
> > dependence on X libs and can be used by any programmer for non-X 
> > projects.
> >
> > 2c) "bin-apps" would contain all other applications originally 
> > contained in "bin" but not contained in "bin-dlls" nor "bin-lndir".
>
>
> This sounds great... although I wonder whether it would be good to split 
> bin-apps into bin-apps (xterm, xeyes, etc) and bin-utils (xauth, xhost etc)

Not sure... it might work okay.

> > 3) Rename all fonts packages from "f100, cyr, fenc, fnts, fscl" to 
> > something like "fonts-100dpi", "fonts-cyrillic", "fonts-encodings", 
> > "fonts-75dpi", and "fonts-scalable".
>
>
> +1
>
> > 4) Split the "fnts" package into a "fonts-required" and "fonts-75dpi". 
> > fonts-required should be a very small package that would allow people 
> > to minimize their download if they are using Xdmcp to reach a KDE or 
> > Gnome desktop, both of which you client-rendered fonts (few fonts 
> > required on your Cygwin/X host in that case).
>
>
> +1
>
> > 5) Rename the "lib" package to something more meaningful. The name 
> > currently implies that it might contain link libraries or run-time 
> > libraries, but it really contains files shared among X packages. 
> > Perhaps "shared-files" would be a better name. I would appreciate it 
> > if someone would look into what Debian and/or Fedora call this package.
>
>
> Fedora has all the /usr/X11R6/lib/locale/ files, 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/rgb.txt /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XErrorDB and 
> /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/XKeysymDB in XFree86-libs-data, the 
> /usr/X11R6/include/X11/bitmaps/ files in XFree86-devel, and on my system 
> doesn't have /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/xedit/lisp/ files so I can't say.
> So I guess libs-data is a good name...

Okay, thanks for looking into that.  "libs-data" doesn't sound too bad. 
 Now to figure out what debian calls it.

> > 6) Rename "fsrv" to "font-server".
>
>
> +1
>
> > 7) Rename "html" to "manual-pages-html".
> >
> > 8) Rename "man" to "manual-pages".
>
>
> what about docs and docs-html for these too?

There was a different "docs" package that had the protocol 
specifications documents in it.  I figured that "manual-pages" would 
imply that these are documents read with "man", not regular text 
documents.  The html package is just html versions of those manual pages.

I dunno... let me know what Fedora calls these packages.

> > Let us know what you think of those and send in your own suggestions 
> > as well.
> >
> > Harold
>
>
> Just some ideas

Thanks,

Harold